There is only that much that can be done........

"There is only that much that can be done by them". How many times have we not heard this statement regarding the helplessness of giant establishments when it comes to grass-root controls. The reason for this is obvious in their sheer size. As the size of corporations increase and as the organization spreads across the globe increasing the customers and the people employed with varied customs, languages, preferences and what not are employed, it is very very difficult to know exactly what one person is doing in the establishment. Now, that is business and we will have this talk some other time. It is like having a dinosaur's body with its pea sized brain.

What I would like to talk about in context is that of facebook, twitter, youtube and the like. With customers varied as is the world, it is a herculean task with a centralized team controlling data into and out of centralized servers. Yes, there are servers in many countries and you would like to call it de-centralized. We will come back to this. If this is the model they still would like to continue then I would suggest these companies to take a leaf out of traditional manufacturing companies. The D&D is made in the parent country. The manufacturing of various parts are made worldwide and assembly takes place in a country which did not participate in any of the other operations. What is happening here is a new variation of scientific management. Wherein specialization is localized and the best locality for a specific job is targeted and optimized. The first step of optimization is the job of zeroing on the place itself. Now, once the manufacturing is done, these traditional companies have a presence in all the states of a specific country at major cities and if possible towns also. This gives the big organization a taste of the local thinking. Now, it is all about targeting in the most optimal way with the differing tastes and cultures in mind.

It is high time these big social media companies learn to localize. Localize normally associated with computers is only language. But, localization is much more than a language. The same language is spoken and written in various ways in a matter of a few 100 kilometers. Now, this knowledge comes if there are teams managing specific local geographical locations. With the amount of ad revenue these companies are reaping, it is a responsibility of giving a bit to the community which makes these websites possible. One of the first steps would be to recruit local talent with a varied specializations so that a majority of the local population is represented. The algorithms can be tweaked to reflect more towards the local taste and reduce the global shit which people dont care. This easily separates the global team with the local team and the local team can curate the ones affecting the local areas more and then move out less affecting issues.

Yes, it is not easy, but that is the way these companies can survive in the future. We now have real federation with the activity pub protocol. Mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed and many more are already on the train. They are working perfectly. You now have people running instances which collect like minded people and share ideas. These instances are at the same time free to expand their vistas by connecting to other like minded ones or related ones. There is a bit of anarchy here and I like it. As one of my friends point out, anarchy as a religion is not acceptable. Anarchy in its pristine form is always preferred. With these small groups, it is very easy for administrators to maintain their instances. The rules are laid out in the beginning itself. In fact you know the rules when you join and instance. You know what you are not supposed to do on that instance. If you want to talk about something else then you should search for such an instance and put your views there.

The proprietary ones cannot be as free spirited as these, but, they should try. Because right now, they are struggling. Administration depends more on algorithms. It is an utter failure. There will always be means wherein content can be put back in other ways. And, these algorithms look for content which is gaining more eyeballs. The easy, digestible, shocking, breaking issues get the eyeballs and the algorithm definitely will support it and brings it into the forefront for other users thereby converting them also. If this is what they want, then it is the job of the government to not allow this. If the government wants exactly this, then stopping this rests on the general public and they should act.

Centralized social networks ending as de-centrailized

There are plenty of articles written on the social network and what plagues them and definitely they will fail as is evident from the recent activities of these behemoths. I have seen people enter their most private information while creating a f*&$book profile as though they are filling up and admission form for college, as though they were to be awarded a lottery without winning. Humans want to belong but at the same time want individuality which I will not try to dwell into since I cannot and leave it to the philosophers. The public network is all about discovering content. The content as envisaged by the pioneers of the public network are linked files. Now to get to that particular linked file the search engines did the homework continuously day and night to have a dictionary of all the links on the public network. Tools were created so that people with minimum computer language added on the links and create sub links and so on.... Now the question is to monetize this situation. Since the Public network was designed to be open and not to be controlled by any single individual/corporation it was difficult. Thus was born the concept of advertisements. This was to put a layer on top of the basic web so as to lock the user out and provide a virtual screen between the content the user wants and the user in front of the computer screen. The user sees the advertisement or the popup and then he is allowed access to the content.


The public did work around this problem by making ad blockers/pop up blockers so that the user gets direct to the content. Now here again we are into two kinds of content creation strategies. Content creation on the public network for the fun of it/use of others and the other is for monetizing every glance a user throws on the content. The second group had no option but to lock the user out completely until he removes all the tools used for blocking ads/pop ups or request the use to allow ads and also consume the content. The second group of content creators were not happy with the situation. Enter social networks. In the beginning stage of the social network boom, users were mostly sharing links to their friends. This was still a healthy situation since these links were still available to the general public without any virtual walls. Trouble started brewing when the people who were sharing links they had created or others had created started creating content on the social network itself. Now this content got locked up within the social network. You cannot share these links with the general public and goes out of scope of search engines. This yielded itself to all sorts of monetization. This also created an artificial beehive where people swarmed to taste the new content created and shared.

Complete wedding albums, Family photographs, Friends photographs, photographs of houses, offices all uploaded with gay abandon to the social network. The network grew in al directions to hoard all this precious content. The content which people were not ready to put up for public consumption and for selective sharing. The same was now available to the social network. The social network is not in vaccum. It is a machine. It has to be maintained. It has to be checked for faulty components. It has to be updated/upgraded. Where does money for all this come from. It has to come from the users. But the users definitely will not pay. They would move to an alternate option or some individual/group might have created a free alternative. Think email.

So how would the user pay. He will pay in ways and means he will not know. The social network will make money from the content created without telling the content creator about these ideas. Why because the content creator is still a human being for whom sharing is at his heart.The thing with content creators is they want to reach the maximum number of consumers. They thought that the social network was the best way they can have this reach. The second level is the metadata of the members which has been collected over the years. The metadata, first and foremost includes the content and then all the other personal aspects of the creator. This combined with the personal aspects of the consumer can be extrapolated to target further creators and consumers. it is all about connecting the creators and consumers and keep them within this walled garden. Then start monetizing. The problem here is corporations also become content creators and the content can be created as though it has been created  by and individual which in turn carries more following. There is always content created to satisfy the need of the consumers rather than the urge of the creator. This is the most dangerous content.

The content, the creators and the consumers create such vast amount of data, the uses of which are impossible to gauge. It is difficult to tell what would be the uses of this data. It is limited only by the capabilities of the researcher. With the amount of computation power at our finger tips, the limits are endless. The trouble with this walled garden is that the monetizer is himself within the walled garden. He is already having an insider view and the holistic view would be provided by the social network data centers. This give a 360 degree view of any individual in this walled garden. You can throw ads at him, You can control his timeline. You can control the reach of his content and what not. Censoring content is most easy here. Since the user don't have any control over the working of this social networking machine. Censoring can happen influenced by big corporations, wealthy individuals, chauvinistic nations etc.

At a time where we have to decide the meaning of privacy, these walled gardens are not helping the cause. People don't know the value of privacy which is similar to the concept of freedom. The main issue is that this is too much of data in the hand of one corporation. How about the content creator owning his content and provide documented ways to access it. Welcome to the de-centralized social network. Think mastodon, Pleroma, peertube etc..